Board Compromises on Flynn’s District : Remap: The plan adds thousands of Latinos to the 5th District. It satisfies the incumbent and activists.

The Ventura County Board of Supervisors, after a week of public acrimony, unanimously approved a plan Tuesday that adds thousands of Latinos to Supervisor John K. Flynn’s Oxnard-area district and avoids a lawsuit by a voting-rights coalition.

The new plan, which meets the key demands of the Latino coalition, was even endorsed by Flynn, who last week angrily lashed out at the rest of the board for backing away from a proposal he favored.

“I’d like to apologize to the board for any comments I might have made” that were offensive, Flynn said at Tuesday’s hearing. He added later, “You have to decide when things are over . . . and we kept more of Oxnard in my district than I thought we would.”

The ordinance approved Tuesday establishes the boundaries of all five supervisorial districts, including the first in the county where a majority of voting-age residents are Latino. About 53% of the adults in Flynn’s 5th District are Latino.

A final vote is scheduled for Tuesday.

Overall, the new borders divide the county’s 669,000 residents almost equally among the five districts. The redrawing of district boundaries is required once a decade to reflect population shifts recorded by the U.S. Census.

Most affected was Flynn’s fast-growing district, which was pared by 7,000 residents to put its population close to the 133,800 optimum for each district.

There has been little criticism of lesser changes made in three other districts, though Supervisor Maria VanderKolk has said that it was difficult to accept the loss of Newbury Park, which was moved from the 2nd District to the 3rd District. No change at all was made in the Simi Valley-based 4th District.

The principal legal issue before the supervisors Tuesday was whether their final plan--gleaned from as many as 30 options considered since June--would satisfy the federal Voting Rights Act. That law prohibits fragmentation of minority communities when new political boundaries are drawn.

“In my mind, the thing that we did was to keep the Hispanic communities together,” Chairwoman Maggie Erickson Kildee said.

Spokesmen for the Ventura County Coalition for Redistricting and Reapportionment, who had threatened a lawsuit if Latino neighborhoods were split, said Tuesday that they were satisfied with the board’s final plan.

“We won,” attorney Marco Antonio Abarca said. “This was about including El Rio and Nyeland Acres in the 5th District, and now they are.”

The final plan increases the voting-age Latino population in Flynn’s district from the current 48% to 53.1%. The Latino coalition favored a plan where Flynn’s district would have 54.5% adult Latinos. The original Flynn-backed plan called for 50.1%.

There are about 2,850 more voting-age Latinos in the final plan than in the district Flynn had proposed.

The increase was accomplished by including heavily Latino El Rio, Nyeland Acres and Del Norte, all unincorporated communities north of Oxnard, in Flynn’s district.

Predominantly white precincts in coastal Oxnard--including Mandalay Bay, Mandalay Colony and Oxnard Shores--were moved to Susan K. Lacey’s 1st District, which is mostly in Ventura.

The final plan leaves Oxnard Airport, Bailard Landfill, Oxnard College and the communities surrounding the Channel Islands Harbor in Flynn’s 5th District, as the supervisor requested.

And in a last-minute change, it leaves the pricey River Ridge housing tract, which surrounds a city golf course, in the 5th District--another concession to Flynn.

Two variations of the final map were drafted Monday by Supervisor Vicky Howard and Flynn. It was Howard who asked the board last Tuesday to rethink its Sept. 10 approval of a Flynn-backed plan and to try to better accommodate the demands of the Latino coalition.

Flynn then accused his colleagues of giving in to “intimidation and fear” and chastised county lawyers and administrators for allegedly pressuring the supervisors into a compromise that would avoid a lawsuit.

Supervisors and administrators said Flynn was just a bad loser. Several were still angry this week and ready to respond if Flynn continued his criticism at Tuesday’s hearing.

He did not. Instead, the four-term supervisor was contrite and upbeat.

After publicly apologizing to those he had criticized, Flynn readily endorsed a plan that gave the Latino coalition a 5th District it could embrace.

Abarca then praised Flynn, calling him a good man with a long record of strongly representing farm workers and Oxnard’s Latinos. “First and foremost, we are not promoting an anti-John Flynn redistricting plan,” Abarca said.

After the hearing, Flynn quickly shook the hands of two supervisors and embraced county Chief Administrative Officer Richard Wittenberg, whom he had publicly scolded last week.

“He said, ‘Please forgive me,’ ” Wittenberg said. “It was a nice hug.”

Wittenberg and Erickson Kildee said they harbored no hard feelings.

“In politics you don’t maintain hard feelings,” Erickson Kildee said. “This was an emotional issue, but as a politician you have to go on to the next issue.”

Flynn agreed, and within 30 minutes of the hearing at which El Rio was added to his district, the supervisor had planted the first sign of his spring, 1992, reelection campaign in front of an El Rio market.

“Just one sign,” Flynn said. “Just to claim the territory.”